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20 March 2009

This is just a quick update about how Pidgin interacts with the rest of the Jaunty desktop. Before we had the following problems:

Pidgin icon sits in notification area when not notifying

Pidgin status can be changed in both the FUSA and in the Pidgin icon

Removing icon gets rid of buddy list's hide-ability

The first point extends into "if Pidgin and Evolution and Empathy and Xchat and ... are all trying to show that you have new messages, that's a lot of icons." The solution that's implemented in Jaunty includes the addition of the messaging Indicator Applet. So far it only works for Pidgin and Evolution (first priority as default apps, I'm guessing), but eventually the others should be added. Ryan's working hard on making sure it works for @-replies in Gwibber as well. Then you can have just this one applet, and eventually, all your messaging stuff will go there. The Indicator Applet is not on the panel by default. You can right-click the panel and hit "Add to Panel" to get it.

On new users, the icon defaults to not showing in the notification area.

When I proposed removing the icon by default, there was an uproar of "but we want to hide the buddy list instead of minimizing it!" A few people I talked to on the bug report, blog comments, and elsewhere online agreed that if there was one applet that could work for all the IM clients to show and hide, that might be pretty nice. Someone noticed. The Indicator Applet does this too. Thanks to whomever made that work.

One note: this is like with Rhythmbox. If you click the X, that's still "close," and for a very good reason. If the X doesn't mean close, it is possible for the buddy list to be hidden in KDE (or in a GNOME session where the user hasn't added the Indicator Applet) with no way to bring it back! I don't use the notification area icon, so when Pidgin started being able to hide when it's not there (so the Indicator Applet could control it), I could see "X is now online" notifications and receive IMs but not get my buddy list to stop being invisible. Thank you very much to Ted Gould for fixing it so that the buddy list only hides from either the icon or the Indicator Applet, and not constantly.

It's damn buggy... i added it several times and i ended up with a lot of white lines i couldn't delete.. but only drag around, so i had to make a new panel. Anyway added one as well when i had pidgin opened and seen some letterbox.. heh..